C O N D E M N E D
by AntlerENVY
Summary: That old, decrepit building belongs to him. And everything in it belongs to him too.


_Dedicated: To love my face off. She. . . loves my face off with MYLAR!!!! Which is better than Sycah, but not as good as Plaude._

* * *

C O N D E M N E D

* * *

He's new. New and alone in a sea of unfamiliar faces. Frighteningly pale ghost-like Americans. He stares at them – the foreign faces – and tries to pretend that they aren't staring right back at him for exactly the same reason.

"Mohinder Suresh." The teacher tries to pronounce it right, he really does, but it's such an odd name that he butchers the pronunciation almost beyond recognition. Mohinder doesn't particularly care, though. This isn't his home, and he knows it. He's just here until something better comes along, because something better always comes along.

His dark skin pulls tight as he forces a smile that is more of a sneer than anything else, because maybe he has forgotten how to smile like he is supposed to. "Here, sir."

Snickers erupt in the classroom, because everyone knows that 'sir' is a sarcastic term only used in snide. Well, not everyone. Mohinder doesn't know it.

He does know it, though, when he is sent out in to the hall with his desk, to do the days assignments in shame. But Mohinder doesn't feel shame. He doesn't feel anything.

Teachers walk by, scowling at the dark boy, who is supposed to be such a good boy, after all, his father is a great scientist. Students come by, too, flocks of students that have open, or are just ditchers and smokers and frauds.

* * *

"Your teacher called me today." Chandra wouldn't care that he hadn't done anything wrong – Chandra never cared for excuses, whether or not that was what they were, since his sister died. "You got kicked out of class?"

His sister, the smart one. His sister, the oldest. His sister, the angel. "Yes father." He doesn't try to explain it to him, doesn't try to defend himself, because Chandra will have none of that.

"If it happens again, I'm moving you down to the basement."

Mohinder tries not to let the terror show on his face, but he knows from the sadistic grin that his father gives him that he failed.

His father is a geneticist by profession, a torture master by vocation.

And he does all of his work in the basement.

* * *

"Mohinder Suresh?" Mohinder is covered in a fresh batch of bruises, and Mohinder nods his head, even though today the pronunciation of his name is worse than the day before. The teacher stares at him, waiting for a reply. "Mohinder Suresh?" He is no closer to pronouncing his name correctly the third time he says it.

"Here." He leaves out the sir, because the thought of being down in the basement, where the screams of his father's test subjects ring hollowly in the sound-proof walls is enough to force him back in to his meek comfort zone, and not a step further.

* * *

The cafeteria is like all other cafeterias he has ever seen. Full of screaming children who act more like animals than anything else, all fighting for food and position.

He chooses the table farthest from the kitchen, the last place that anyone would want to sit, and waits patiently for the line to die down so that he can go in search of whatever scraps the others may have left for him.

"You're in our seat." There is a boy, dressed in a pressed white shirt that he did not pick out for himself, whose face is dotted with acne and sweat, staring down at him through thick glasses that magnify his eyes ten fold. Mohinder leaps out of the seat out of habit, and begins to apologize profusely. Luckily, he remembers to keep out the bit of 'don't tell daddy.'

"Nerd." The boy says, more than a bit hypocritically, and takes the seat that Mohinder had so hastily given up.

The line for food is gone now, but Mohinder isn't that hungry.

* * *

By the third day he couldn't just wander around anymore. The forty-five minute lunch was dull and endless, and all the others did was stop and stare and ridicule. What a clumsy boy! A girl would say, fooled by his lie that the fresh batch of bruises was caused by his own clumsiness. Why is his skin so dark?

Mohinder would sigh at this, and wonder why, even in the sophomore year in high school, the students couldn't figure out that just because the years of traveling the country with his father had left his accent at home with his mother, didn't mean that he was supposed to look like them too.

* * *

The sun in the Nevada summers is hot, and Mohinder closed his eyes as he tilted his head back. Such a sun he hadn't felt in too long, and if he never felt one again, it would be too soon. He wanted to find shade, but it was impossible – all of the 'groups' had reserved spaces to hide from the sun, and he – with his foreign expressions and odd mannerisms – was not welcome in to any of them.

By the fourth day, he found a spot.

A tiny crook in the wall, probably carved out by a sloppy miscreant trying to damage the school with a sledgehammer and a pick ax, had cut a hole in to the side of the old abandoned stage that the school hadn't worked up the funds to tear down just yet. Termites had left the place condemned, and no one in their right mind would dare go in to the creaking building that had been the basis for most of the town's horror stories.

By the fourth day in that sun, though, Mohinder wasn't in his right mind.

The auditorium is more humid than the outside, and the air is thick and stale and Mohinder has to pant just to be able to breath, but at least he is out of the sun. Slowly, Mohinder strips his shirt from his body, and pulls his dark, thick hair off of his neck.

He lets out a sigh of relief and slumps against a wall, arching back quickly from the heat of the brick walls. "Ouch . . ."

"Who's there?"

Mohinder flinches, and retreats in to a corner where the sun isn't shining. He can't see anything, but whoever else is in here can't see him either.

"I said, who's there." The voice is impatient, and deep, and Mohinder shivers from the wave of cold air that brushes over him as the stranger stalks by. I'm being hunted. . . Mohinder realizes with the feeling of something not entirely unlike fear.

The hair on the back of his neck raises, and there is a crunch of glass right in front of him. Suddenly, Mohinder is pinned to the wall, his both of his hands caught in one of this boys larger, stronger hands, his body pinned by his body, his mouth crushed in to his.

He wants to scream, to demand what the other boy could possibly be thinking, but he is in his mouth, and his other hand is pressed against Mohinder's stomach, going lower, pressing harder, and Mohinder has to arch away from the hot, hot wall and in to this strangers hot, hot embrace just to keep from burning up.

"This is my hangout." The boy told him, brushing his lips against Mohinder's once, twice. "Anything in it is mine too."

He releases him, and Mohinder stumbles forward, back out in to the sunlight. He turns back once, to try to see the boy who stole his first kiss, but the sun is shining to brightly and has blinded him and all he can do is hold his hands to his lips and run.

* * *

"You haven't been getting in trouble at school, have you Mohinder?" Chandra is down in the basement, working on one of his latest 'studies,' and he demands that Mohinder sits in on every experiment. Even though the eyes that follow him, pleading for their freedom, have made him sick more than once. Even though he wants nothing to do with him.

Chandra insists that humans are evolving – and heroes and being born from the evolution. He insists on it, and tortures innocent people until he is proving wrong. Until someone will convince him that maybe his thesis is just a load.

"No Father." Mohinder doesn't tell him about the kiss, because Mohinder is trying to forget.

And failing.

* * *

He tries to find another spot to hang out. No one will hang out with him, though, and they all shy away from him as quickly as they see him without even bothering to explain their strong dislike of him.

One little girl that he manages to corner though, confesses that Gabriel Gray, a Junior, had told them all that Mohinder had been bad luck at his old school, and that his sister's body had been found in his room, murdered.

Gabriel Gray had warned them all that if they valued their lives, they would stay away from Mohinder Suresh.

"But who's Gabriel Gray?" Mohinder asks, more than a bit put out that he can't make new friends just because someone was spreading filth and lies about him.

The girl gives a shaky nod towards the old condemned auditorium, and it makes more sense to Mohinder now.

"Thank you."

She runs as though there are dogs on her tail. Mohinder sighs, and looks away from the condemned building, and tries to pretend that he doesn't feel it's ancient, dusty eyes watching him, calling him to come back in to it's humid shade.

* * *

Chandra wants him to come down to meet his latest assistant. By assistant, though, Mohinder knows he really means victim. So he leaves, going to the only place that seems safe.

Mohinder and Shanti Suresh, despite their age difference, had been inseparable before her death.

Chandra, who has been a bit insane since the death of their mother, drags them around the American countryside, only leaving when he is offered a better job or the cops are coming close to finding out where all of those missing people are at.

Once, Chandra cold eyes had turned to Mohinder.

"You look so much like your mother. . ." He had told the boy, ignoring the girl, who was nothing like the mother, because the mother wasn't her mother at all. Nothing in Mohinder's eyes belonged to his father though, and Chandra knows it. "Let me try something . . ."

Shanti had saved him. Shanti always saved him.

Until he couldn't return the favor.

The condemned building seems safer at night for some reason, and he doesn't know why, but he thinks that he can see inside of it better now than when the daylight is shining through. Moonlight slips through the broken mortar bathing him in white light, and Mohinder revels in the damp warmth of the condemned building.

He curls up in a ball, clutching his knees to his chest, and sleeps.

And dreams.

* * *

Mohinder had been twelve and Shanti had been thirteen and they had both been so damned curious that they didn't think much of it at all.

Spent and tired, the siblings had collapsed on to his bed, him clinging like the child he was to his sister, and he asked her if it was wrong that he loved her as much as he did.

"We aren't really related though." Shanti reminded him, toying with the ends of his hair. "Remember?"

Shanti had such a way of explaining things away. Mohinder slept easily, because Shanti would be there in the morning to wake him up and protect him from the world.

* * *

"I thought I told you that this was my place?" The voice wakes him up, just before the cold soles of the boy's shoe grind in to his ribs, forcing Mohinder to cough and clutch his stomach in pain. "Well?"

Mohinder doesn't have anything to say for himself, because he still has one foot in dream-land, where Shanti can protect him, but it is coming to meet the one planted firmly on the ground much too quickly for his tastes.

The boy leans down, and Mohinder can make out a relatively large nose and dark, taught brows. "What did I tell you, Mohinder?"

Mohinder doesn't question how he knows his name - as it is, he has an inkling as to who he may be. "Everything here belongs to you."

"Including?"

Mohinder gulps, and leans up. "Me."

* * *

Mohinder sneaks out every night now, after his father has retired to the basement, to go to the condemned building like the condemned soul that he is.

_(Priests and Cannibals, everybody happy as the dead go home)_

Sylar is there to met him.

_(big black nemesis, pathenogenisis, no one move a muscle as the dead go home)_

When they have sex, Mohinder pretends that he is Shanti, because Gabriel Gray has a funny way of making him feel as though everything is going to be alright.


End file.
